workers' struggles and Marxism

Menu

Travis Reinking: A sick puppy in a sick society

Nice, normal looking racist Travis Reinking; the “thinking” of his mother. But it’s exactly her thinking that bred this terrorist.

The outrage over the granting of bail for Travis Reinking was too much. As Newschannel5 reported, the bail was revoked “following public outcry from the community.” One lawyer explained why Reinking got the $2 million bail. He said that in Tennessee, a judge can only deny bail if the prosecutor is going to seek the death penalty. That raises more questions than it answers. Why, after all, is the prosecutor not seeking the death penalty for a man accused of the premeditated murder of four victims? It’s not that socialists should ever support the power of these corporate-controlled and racist courts to execute anybody, even Reiking, but does anybody doubt that if the situation were reversed, and a black man were accused of murdering four white people, that the prosecutor would not have immediately announced he or she is seeking the death penalty?

Yes, Reinking is sick, but the question is why did his sickness take this particular form? Where did his extreme right wing politics come from? In part, it came from his family. According to one report, his father Jeff is the owner of a crane company. There is little on Jeff’s page to give any indication of where he’s coming from. However, his mother, Judy, is different. Among other things, she seems to be a Christian fundamentalist. She’s also quoted as having written: “When you carry a bible, the devil gets a headache. When you open it, he collapses. When he sees you reading it, he faints. When he sees you living it, he flees…”

In 2015, she shared a graphic on school shootings. It reads: “I don’t remember a single school shooting when I was a kid. What I do remember is our teacher having us begin the day reciting the pledge of allegiance, reading from the Bible and praying. We also had the Ten Commandments on the wall. Maybe getting rid of those things wasn’t such a good idea after all!” Or maybe it’s exactly this sort of thinking that leads to the sickness in US society that produces the son of the author of these words!

Meanwhile, the racist terrorist in chief, Trump, has said nothing. But he wasn’t so silent about the case of Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, the undocumented immigrant in San Francisco, who shot and killed a young woman. In that case, the jury found that Zarate had shot her by accident. Trump was outraged. Trump is encouraging this sort of thinking, and he’s handing it down to people like Judy Reinking.